Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
If a game is only released on Epic, it hasn’t been released yet. Its just in some weird alpha state until it has broader release.
For me, its like it didn’t have a release at all. There are allot more game I want to play of years ago. No fomo.
Know what happens when I find out a game is Epic exclusive? I don’t buy it for a year… Sometimes ever. Enjoy the Epic money kings, hope it’s worth it.
Epic supports third party launchers
I think Steam is the only platform I avoid that works on Linux
I feel the same, when the game is not available on GOG.
Pretty sure this is a screenshot of the upcoming game Infinity Nikki and OP must have checked before they added the windows launcher for preload.
Ragebait :(
ding ding ding
I’m wondering if it will run on the Steamdeck I bought my daughter for Christmas.
which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Yar, me as well.
Literally anything? Great news!
If you go to the official website for the game Infinity Nikki, where the pic is taken, and look to the left of what the OP cropped, there is a standalone Windows download. You can just download the game.
The game is F2P so while it’s not some big accomplishment to pirate like you’re implying, it is almost certainly loaded with predatory monetization.
Yo ho ho, There is no sailing on the high seas when we are talking about multiplayer games! Alive service game, it be!
For what reason? Why is Epic so bad? I’m not fishing for a reaction. I genuinely don’t know why most people here hate Epic
Epic is anti-customer: https://medium.com/@unfoldgames/why-i-turned-down-exclusivity-deal-from-the-epic-store-developer-of-darq-7ee834ed0ac7
Tldr: Kickstarter Game with a lot of interest while in development announces a release date on Steam. After the date announcement they get contacted by Epic saying “we’d love to host your game” for an exclusivity deal.
Dev responds that they would be happy to have their game on Epic but promises were made during crowd funding that it would be available on Steam.
Epic replies that they aren’t interested if it’s not exclusive.This tells me that
- Epic is full of shit. "We’d love to have your game, but only if it’s exclusive.
- Epic doesn’t care about being a better service for its customers. Having the game available on Epic as well is strictly better for Epic’s customers and they easily could have done that. They chose not to.
- Epic is not interested in actually having to compete with other companies. This would require them to provide a better service in some fashion. They are only interested if they can force people “if you want to purchase this game you have to buy it through us” which is anti-consumer.
The Epic Games Store is a user data collection platform first, and a pretty bad game store/client second. It’s slow, buggy, difficult to navigate (though that’s somewhat subjective), and sometimes doesn’t work without an Internet connection, even for games you already have downloaded locally and installed.
Disclaimer: I understand that any games store, including Steam, collects user data. But at least those other stores provide working, user friendly features in exchange for the data collection they do.
Copied from a comment I posted in this thread:
I got exactly one free epic game (subnautica) that I uninstalled and bought immediately the day I couldn’t play the game because I lost Internet and there was no goddamned offline mode.
Epic store is shovelware, and I can’t believe the amount of people who defend a 4th rate store comparing itself to the gold standard that can’t even offer basic functionality expected of a modern platform.
Lol I stayed away because the anticompetitiveness was immediately obvious (they should have opened with the free games but showed their hand early by starting with exclusivity deals), but I’m not surprised it gets even worse.
Hey sailor… ;)
Hoist the sales!
But why? It’s just a downloader. It downloads.
I hate when companies inconvenience me while trying to disrupt a near-monopoly by my benign benefactors.
Are they trying to disrupt a “near-monopoly” or is Epic trying to create its own monopoly through exclusivity deals?
I wonder how much Epic games makes at the end of the day. most companies that do stuff like this operate at a huge loss, functioning only through investment capital until they starve out their competition and become the head of a monopoly at which point their investors become even more pointlessly wealthy. However I believe this works so often because those competitors are also operating off of investor capital and eventually their investors decide to sell out and switch teams to get some of their investment back. How does this work with Valve? Unlike companies previously discussed Valve is a privately held company and has control over their own company, as evidenced by the fact that they seem to make discissions in favor of long term goals instead of short term profits, a concept that has grown foreign to the US market. On top of the fact they are currently the leader in online game sales, I’m unsure how epic can justify, what i would assume, is a huge sum of money constantly paying for exclusives. Maybe im wrong and the pie is so large Epic is currently operating financially soundly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Regardless we should all be happy that this market is not a clear cut monopoly, competition is a consumer win.
I haven’t created an epic account even for the free games I don’t care how many awesome games they give out for free. Fuck Epic
I created an epic account solely for the free games, which I claim and never play. Fuck Epic. I still haven’t forgiven them for ruining Rocket League.
Excuse my ignorance. What did Epic do?
Exclusivity deals with companies.
Yeah, they expressed that they wanted to join the online game store scene and the big feature they were offering to draw in users was… anticompetitive exclusivity deals!
Plus the company killed off the unreal tournament franchise because they didn’t want it to compete with fortnite.
I have no interest in supporting a company that thinks removing options is the best way to get users to use their products.
It’s the same shit that has turned streaming services from great back when it was new to now having content spread across many competing services. I’d rather they competed based on their own platform’s features and advantages than the whole “if you want to watch x, you must use service y”. It’s just a series of mini monopolies.
Copying my reply to someone else:
Epic is anti-customer: https://medium.com/@unfoldgames/why-i-turned-down-exclusivity-deal-from-the-epic-store-developer-of-darq-7ee834ed0ac7
Tldr: Kickstarter Game with a lot of interest while in development announces a release date on Steam. After the date announcement they get contacted by Epic saying “we’d love to host your game” for an exclusivity deal.
Dev responds that they would be happy to have their game on Epic but promises were made during crowd funding that it would be available on Steam.
Epic replies that they aren’t interested if it’s not exclusive.This tells me that
- Epic is full of shit. "We’d love to have your game, but only if it’s exclusive.
- Epic doesn’t care about being a better service for its customers. Having the game available on Epic as well is strictly better for Epic’s customers and they easily could have done that. They chose not to.
- Epic is not interested in actually having to compete with other companies. This would require them to provide a better service in some fashion. They are only interested if they can force people “if you want to purchase this game you have to buy it through us” which is anti-consumer.
But One Must Fall 2097 was pretty sweet
It doesn’t upset me. It helps me decide which games to avoid wasting my time and money on.
I tried GTA5 when I made an account there. The game was given free. Didn’t play for long though, and I dislike the idea of having more than Steam. (I have GOG for Sims but I don’t use that either)
I tried Rocket League at work. It is fun and I’d like to continue at home…but opening up that Epic Store kinda is a turn-off for the deal.
Valve kills physical ownership of games: I sleep
Games exclusive to Origin: I sleep
Games exclusive to whatever the fuck Blizzard made: I sleep
Games exclusive to Microsoft Store: I sleep
Games exclusive to Epic: REAL SHIT
So much this
don’t hide the full story, they pay devs millions to keep their games exclusive to epic for a year. that is an extremely scummy business practice that you are rewarding and encouraging if you buy from this shitfest of a platform
When Half Life 2 launched, you had to register your game with Steam before you could play it. You had to give up your physical ownership of the product, and lock it to yourself. You couldn’t sell it to anyone else, or even let them play it.
That’s what you were encouraging by buying from that shitfest of a platform.
I really don’t see how bunging devs money for publishing rights is worse. The devs clearly don’t see it that way.
they pay devs millions
I mean I see this as a good thing. I have to keep a separate launcher around but… at least that dev is getting a great deal and will probably be able to support that game for a while (or start their next one)
-Valve didn’t kill ownership it was already dead. DLC has been pulled, and games delisted, as well as games made unplayable by server shutdowns. They just happened to be the platform who told you to your face what you were getting into while everyone else lied and said the game was yours until it wasn’t. They also say they’ll provide downloads for a time if they ever shut down, but if you want that long term guarantee you’re probably better off looking at GOG and some kind of data storage for the installers.
-Origin is shit and I hate EA/Origin exclusives too, but it’s basically a launcher for their own games which I understand, but still prefer steam to be included too, so much of the time I avoid EA games (i avoid them for a lot of reasons tbh)
-Battle.net started as a unified launcher for blizzard games, which sort of made sense as they never worked with or were involved with steam, and many of their games were disc based or had its own installer. Subscriptions specifically I don’t think existed with steam for a while so that was sort of a complicating factor. Still wish their games were on steam, but it sort of made sense at its inception.
-I don’t even use the microsoft store unless forced to, I find it annoying and bleh. They’re forcing more games to it and it’s shitty too.
-Epic is annoying, but it’s a special kind of annoying because for many games early on, they would announce steam as a supported platform, some even sold the game on steam, until they changed to Epic exclusives. I think Fall Guys was one example. The bait and switch really lost them trust with a lot of gamers and you’ll find the attitude towards them can be pretty bad because of that history.
Add in that many of the games aren’t published by them, they just threw money at the publisher or devs to make their games epic exclusive. This can be good for developers, like an upfront investment, but sucks for gamers who like to keep things somewhat unified in terms of a game library. Especially when you already have to deal with 5 other launchers, another arbitrary one is pretty annoying.
If you’re wondering why people want their games on steam, look at the features. Free cloud save backups, a decent amount of free screenshot backups, in game recording is new and pretty neat, achievements, community marketplaces, frequent sales, family sharing, steam workshop for easy integrated modding, discussions and guides for all your games, early access games, built in friends, text chat, voice chat, remote play together, game streaming, etc.
TLDR: It isn’t an “oh epic stinky just because” situation. The Epic game store simply doesn’t have feature parity, bait and switched gamers multiple times with exclusives after games were advertised as being on steam, and basically survived on throwing money at devs to put their games exclusively on EGS, at the expense of the people who want to play those games on their chosen platform. Doesn’t shock me that they don’t have a lot of positive PR in the community.
Its because the other exclusives are the devs/publishers launcher. While epic was actively seeking those 1year exclusivity deals to get more users on the platform.
So it would be better if it was a permanent exclusivity deal, like traditional publishers have?
They’ve been paying out in advance in some cases (Epic Mega Grants, I think) so the devs can finish the game. That’s basically the definition of what publishers do, but when Epic do it it’s somehow “not publishing”?
Well it really depends how you look at it. For the devs it’s better in terms of how much they get per purchase given that epic takes a lower cut than steam, IIRC 15% as opposed to 30%.
But many users hate epic as a platform seeing how it’s not as mature in features, and probably just pure love of steam.
What I’m actually wondering about is if it’s worth signing the exclusivity deal seeing how some people will not bother buying a game on a platform they hate or do enough people purchase for it to even out and even gain a larger profit.
steam and valve has also been generally more respectful with users than mostly any other online business, not even just in the space of online software stores. of course it’s not all rainbows and glitter but the point stands.
Valve kills physical ownership of games: I sleep
kills? most of them work with a steam emu, even offline. that’s not even cracking. most of those that don’t have a different limitation.
with a steam emu you can do whatever you want with the game files, often you can put it on your pendrive and play it as a portable game (the right goldberg emu settings allow game data to be stored near the game files instead of appdata)
I guess, Epic Games sales cuts seems attractive for multiplatform games with microtransaction made with Unreal Engine…
what is the problem with epic? I like the weekly free games
Well mine is pretty petty. Every time I start up my system I’m spammed by epic advertisements in the lower right. It’s just so obnoxious, particularly since I’m on my couch and using my controller, so I have to pick up keyboard to dismiss those.
I’m so lazy I haven’t bothered to investigate options to be fair, but broadly speaking I don’t like how much it screams “look at me, look at me!” when I had no intention of interacting with their store/launcher at all that time.
they pay devs (mostly indie) millions to make their games exclusive to epic for up to over a year. i’d rather not support a company that pays to limit your choice as a consumer
I guess I don’t feel limited because I already have an epic account, which was free to create
free lol. did you look at the privacy policy, or just accepted it hastily?
care to state your point directly?
I prefer steam, I’d like to be able to choose what platform I buy a game on. Outside of just not wanting a 5th launcher because I hate having a billion launchers, Steam has many features the EGS doesn’t have. Free cloud save backups and screenshot backups, steam workshop for mods, remote play together, game streaming, etc. I also really like steam having player reviews too.
fair
I like them too but I’ve noticed that some games are not updated to the same version as their Steam counterparts.
They’re basically announcing “We’re a business, but we’re not all that interested in making money.”
